"Personally, Peter didn't suffer. He had other hobbies. In his big front room upstairs he had a bookcase filled with the best standard books, from Shakespeare down, and he was familiar with all of them.

Also he had a violin. He seldom brought it down to the family living-room but alone in his sanctum upstairs it was like a living companion. On summer evenings, when the windows were open, the neighbors would sit on their verandas and listen for Peter's violin.

It seldom disappointed them. And whether the violin was in any way responsible or not, Peter had another accomplishment which few people ever suspected--he was a finished dancer. He hadn't studied it at all. Once, in his most impressionable years, he had attended a dance after a barn-raising, and he had taken to it like a puppy to the water.

"A few times afterwards he had been invited to dancing parties in homes in the neighborhood, and while he was dancing he enjoyed them, but when that stopped he was at sea. There were the interludes to be spent in cosy corners and on stair steps, when he felt as much out of his element as a buffalo at a pony show. Small talk was an accomplishment of which he knew nothing and which held a kind of terror for him--and these very informal gatherings seemed to demand an appalling amount of it.

"Every winter Peter spent a week or two with the cousins in town. He knew as much of city ways as any other wide-awake young man who lives on a farm within easy travelling distance, and he had the same amazing faculty for getting the most out of these flying trips. He knew just what plays were showing in the theatres--the daily papers reach neighborhoods far more obscure than Birchfield--and he knew pretty well which plays were most worth seeing. He knew when Mischa Elman would be in town and timed his visits accordingly. He knew what churches he wanted to visit--a review of the sermons was one of the treats he took home to his father and mother. And he knew that he wanted to have one night's unbroken enjoyment with the best orchestra in the best dance-hall in the city. His cousins never failed him in this. They were girls who never frequented a dance-hall on any other occasion, but Peter's enthusiasm, and his dancing were irresistible.

These annual dissipations kept him in touch with the art, as it were.

With the pa.s.sing seasons when Fashion 'hesitated' or one-stepped or fox-trotted, Peter did it too, for one night, then came home and dropped it absolutely for the rest of the year.

"Besides his violin and his library, Peter had a very businesslike looking desk in his room. He was secretary of about every agricultural organization in the district--fairs and such like. That which occupied more of his time, however, was a pile of hand-drawn maps of the neighborhood with a line dotted in to show where an electric power-line might come through if a sufficient number of farmers could be persuaded to co-operate toward that end. After every meeting of possible supporters he would come home and shift the line a little, somewhat as a general, hard pressed, shifts his line of defence. He used to drop into the office, worried to death about it.

'There's something wrong with Birchfield,' he would storm. 'We're too satisfied with ourselves. If something isn't done soon we won't have enough people left to care whether it goes off the map or not. The radial and power line would bring new life--people who have something left to work for, and their effort might stir up the whole place.'

"One evening this spring he drove into the town to attend a meeting of the power-line committee. He opened up the council chamber, lifted the windows to let in some clean air and waited. No one else came. No doubt he was finding the whole thing very discouraging; anyway when it was too late to expect anyone else he decided to go home, and I suppose when he was putting down the windows he caught the sound of the orchestra in the dance-hall across the street. He had heard it often enough before, of course, and had paid no more attention to it than if it had been a hand organ on the corner. This night, with the defiance that has led disappointed men into more serious dissipations, he walked across the street in the face of whoever cared to look, and disappeared up the dirty stairs.

"The Birchfield dance-hall was really not so very bad, as such places go; the town fathers would have cleared it out if they could have found a case against it. There was nothing lax in the morals of Birchfield as a munic.i.p.ality. If it had any indirect, insidious influence, that, of course, was out of their province. As individuals they did what they could to discourage it. The better people wouldn't let their daughters go, nor their sons if they could help it, but of course a lot of the boys drifted in. There was nothing else to do.

The hall was well patronized by the factory girls from the lower part of the town--it would be no worse for that. They were mostly good-hearted, hard-working girls; this was the best the town had to offer them in the way of a good time, and they made the most of it--only there was an over-sophisticated, imported forelady in town at the time, and it happened that most of the evening she danced with Peter.

"There is a library in Birchfield not a hundred yards from the dance-hall, but it's safe to say that ninety per cent. of the people who attended the dances didn't know what the inside of the library looked like. It's amazing how many different cliques, castes, or strata can flourish in a small town without ever rubbing shoulders with each other; how many inst.i.tutions can exist and never touch the lives of half the people! And the girl who was librarian had perhaps never spoken to the girls who worked in the factory. It wasn't her fault. Dorothy Walton is neither a sn.o.b nor a high brow; but the social customs of Birchfield were so hedged about by habits of longstanding that there was no common meeting ground for those who happened to be once cast into separate grooves. It made life rather narrow for all of them, and Miss Walton was planning to leave Birchfield.

"Driving his car into town one evening Peter overtook her on the country road and gave her a ride. She told him that she had been helping to revise the library in the school on the corner of his farm, and he wasn't interested. He says he remembered his own school days and pitied the poor little beggars who had to depend on any school library for their reading. In fact he had seen Miss Walton many times before and hadn't been at all interested in what she was doing. He supposed a librarian was a person who kept the books straight on the shelves. And she wasn't at all interested in him. She didn't know about his books at home, or his violin or the power-line.

She only knew that he was a young man of good family, who was becoming notoriously popular at the dance-hall. That was where he went when he left her.

"And all the time Peter's mother talked of 'When Peter gets married.'

And Peter went on dancing with the commonest kind of a dance-hall girl. Of course his mother wouldn't have needed to worry over the possibility of his bringing home a bride of this type. If he had been ten years younger she might have been dangerous. The danger for Peter now was that he might develop into the gay old dog searching around for amus.e.m.e.nt anywhere, compromising with all the standards that had made him a man any woman might like. The Birchfield dances had not fascinated him--he had gone to them because there was nothing else to do. He was a student and a dreamer; he was also human. There had been no one to share his dreams, but he had found what seemed to be an outlet for his humanness.

"Two weeks ago an unprecedented thing happened in Birchfield--not in the village, but among the farms in the Summers' neighborhood. Some woman conceived the startling idea that the people were not getting together enough--not just for the future of the power-line, but for the good of their souls. They were also missing a great deal by not being acquainted with the people in neighboring communities. The village hadn't proved a desirable centre; so they would create a centre of their own in their own neighborhood, and make it of such a character that the best people of the village would come to them.

They invited the people from neighboring communities all over the township; they asked Peter to come and state the case for the power-line; and they had Miss Walton there to talk about libraries.

I was at the meeting myself and when the girl got up to speak I was heartily sorry for her. It was plain that she was frightened; she was not used to talking to crowds of people older than the children who came to her story hour at the library. It seems Peter noticed this too, and set himself to help her. I suppose he began with the idea that if giving her his undivided attention would be of any use he would see her through. She saw him and it did help. The next minute she had forgotten him--she was lost in her story; she loved books with a human affection and she was carried away with them, as any lover loses himself in the thing he loves. And there sat poor old Peter, staring. I suppose he had never dreamed that anyone else, at least any girl, ever thought of things that way. When everyone else applauded, he still sat, staring. And he had lived five miles from this girl all his life, and had known her--as a librarian.

"The rest of the night's programme was a bigger surprise to Birchfield. The furniture was pushed to the walls and an old character who cuts wood for the farmers by day and fiddles for dances at night was tuning his violin--and Peter had the shock of his young life when he saw his own stately father and his rather portly, dignified mother lead out a set at the lancers. It was largely an old-people's dance, and they laughed a lot, and panted a lot over it; but there was no doubt they enjoyed it. Afterwards they went off in little groups by themselves, and looked on pityingly at their young folks' degeneracy into fox-trotting.

"There were a lot of young people from the country around who hadn't learned to dance--the town dance hall was the only available dancing school and naturally they weren't encouraged to go there. When the farming community started a dance of its own it was inevitable that there should be a lot of boys and girls standing around the walls, watching. So the chairwoman of the evening cut into things, pushed the dancers off to one half of the floor, and had a row of benches strung across to keep them there, then made the announcement that Miss Walton would give the others a lesson on the fox-trot. I looked about for Peter just then, and found him standing against the wall, still staring. If the girl had been embarra.s.sed on the platform she was perfectly at home here. It seems she teaches dancing to a kindergarten cla.s.s at the library on Sat.u.r.day afternoons. She strung her cla.s.s out in a circle and spent some time drilling them in the step of it; then, encouraging as a mother bird flying ahead, watchful as a drill sergeant, she led them swinging around the room, counting 'one and two and three and fo-ur and two-step in and two-step out,'

like a professional dancing teacher. Properly or not, she had them all fox-trotting in ten minutes. Then she told them to try it together and when she went to demonstrate this Peter was there. As far as I can learn he hasn't been far away ever since.

"This happened just two weeks ago. Driving through, you don't see the effect on the neighborhood yet--but it's already visible enough in Peter. He's going after the power-line now in a way that can't fail to bring it within the next year, and the Summers won't have to sell the old homestead--a calamity that they were beginning to fear themselves. There will be many other cases that we don't hear about, and all because several communities, including a town, pooled their social interests."

"Rather heavy stuff, all this community investigation," Billy remarked as they drove away. "I started out with the idea of impressing you with the freedom and restfulness of country life, and we've found nothing but responsibility. It would seem that every socially minded person going to the country should go with the spirit of a foreign missionary."

"They'd be dreadful nuisances if they did, though. All the worth-while things seem to have just grown out of someone's wanting other people to be happy. You don't go after it like a profession.

You don't try to see the whole world at once--just your own little corner. First, your own family--you want them to be happy because you like them; then your own neighbors--you want them to be happy because you know them. It works out wonderfully in a natural little way of its own, too. When you're very happy you want everyone else to have the same things that make you happy. That's why it's the best first investment a woman can make for the world to keep the fires warm in her own house. You can't imagine a family quarrelling among themselves and wanting to take in a tramp, can you?"

"And I suppose a family self-centred is almost as bad as an individual self-centred. But next week let's let our friend judge his own plots while we do some of this linking up with city advantages which he says is so important to a broadened outlook. Let's see 'Dear Brutus.' After all this researching into the whereforeness of failures in a community we ought to be prepared for the theme. How is it it goes? 'The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars but in ourselves.' Sounds like some more sermonizing, but if it is it will be fairly subtle."

CHAPTER XIX.

_"One can miss the best happiness of marriage because one travels through it in kid gloves, Pullman cars, first-cla.s.s staterooms, and grand hotels. Rich, city-bred, voluntarily childless, one can mince through marriage as sightseers promenade in a forest on a gravelled path with hand-rails, signposts, and seats. On the other hand, one may know marriage as Kipling's Mowgli knew the forest, because he travelled as well in the tree-tops as on the springy ground._"--_Dr. Richard Cabot, in "What Men Live By."_

With "Dear Brutus" there was the usual surprised delight when the curtain rose, at the birds and sunshine in the English garden, the piquant fascination of the dwarf magician, then the unfolding of the tragedy of the failure-lives begging a second chance, and the whimsical fairy tale of the enchanted garden--the land of "Might Have Been."

Billy was accustomed to the impulsive touch of a hand on his sleeve, at the high spots in plays, not a nervous, bothersome little hand, but a warm electric contact as quickly withdrawn while the girl kept her eyes fast on the stage. Sometimes he lost the effect of half the best acting in his amus.e.m.e.nt at watching her, like a child actually living for the moment in the drama going on before her. He was accustomed also to the tears that welled up at emotional parts, tears usually with a smile shining through them. But he was not prepared for the deluge that swept her when the impenetrable darkness came down over the enchanted garden and the little dream daughter, who might have set things right for the misunderstood artist, cried in the hopelessness of a child's terrified loneliness "I don't want to be a 'Might Have Been.'"

He had seen her weep in poetic enjoyment of pathetic parts before, but this was different and offered no explanation for itself. Sitting as close as the arm of the chair and the formality due in a public place would allow, he got the impact of each fresh shock. He was genuinely concerned. It was a most helpless situation. There were ways of meeting it, of course, which he knew--but not in a public theatre.... If only the lights would go out! Still it troubled him a little. And when it was over her sole comment was "Wasn't it wonderful!"

"You liked it!"

"It was the most beautiful thing--"

"Even the garden? Just what was the trouble?"

"I hardly know myself. Sometime I'll try to tell you."

There would always be something left to tell--a new world dawning every morning, new mysteries unfolding every evening--a wonderful blessing on a long journey together.

When he left her he stood bareheaded, boyish in his humility, and spoke, as thousands of lovers had done before him, of the time when she would go all the way home with him.

It came in October. The painters had fairly crowded the carpenters out of the house, and before the last varnish was dry on the woodwork Billy had cleared away the wreckage of mortar, boxes and discarded scaffolds and left the house standing trim and solid between the sentinel pines, unmistakably new, but looking as though it had grown there. The next day Ruth's aunt, accompanied by a capable charwoman and a truck load of boxes, known in the housewife's vernacular as chests, decorously chaperoned her niece to her future home to arrange furniture and hang curtains and give the last touches toward making it sufficiently habitable to begin with. The aunt wasn't just sure that it was the proper thing for a girl to visit her fiancee's house before she was married. She didn't know that Ruth had rope-walked the naked joists in the moonlight with Billy many times while the building was in progress; that they had measured the windows for curtains by the gleam of a flashlight a month before, else how could they have planned every last chair and hanging. The next night they came home to the house together.

The girl had protested at the idea of a wedding trip. "We both like that hill farm better than anywhere else in the world," she said.

"Why should we go racing off to some place we don't care about?"

"And defy an old custom like that?" he argued; but he knew that she knew how much he had wanted exactly that.

So they had gone to the church in the afternoon and had come back to a reception at the aunt's afterwards--a very nice affair with the luxurious old rooms candle-lighted and hung with autumn leaves. And their best friends had come to wish them well, with all the noise and chatter common to such occasions, even among very well bred people; and as soon as they could, they kissed the aunt and slipped away, getting a last glimpse of Jean and the Agricultural Representative, apparently completely lost in some panorama unfolding itself before them in the open fire.

The car swung out of the city streets on to the smooth, winding country road, a familiar road, but somehow different. At the crest of the hill they stopped and looked back at the city glittering in a cup below them.

"Sure you're not sorry you're leaving it?" Billy asked.

"Quite sure. But it isn't the city's fault. It isn't a natural place to live; but it has a lot to give in other ways."

"Things we must try to keep in touch with."

"Only there are times when neither city nor country, nor anything else, matters. It's only people that count--"

But Billy was very appreciative and that sentence was never quite finished.

They were miles from the lights of the city now. A long stretch of road through woods and pastures, a white frost glittering on the fields and fences, a golden moonlight filtering through the branches of wind-swept trees and yellowing the dead leaves on the moist, black roadway, a cold white mist lying in the valley and never a sound but the steady purring of the engine. Presently a little cabin stood out alone in a clearing, its lights out, a faint white plume of smoke arising slowly from its chimney.

"Always seems a sort of lonely little house," Billy remarked. "It must be a jolt to come out of the heart of a city to a spot like this. The compensation, of course, is that people have to love each other harder--sometimes there isn't much else. When they don't, the result is terrible."